1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a digital pictorial book system, a pictorial book searching method, and a machine readable medium storing thereon a pictorial book searching program. More particularly, the present invention relates to a digital pictorial book system and a pictorial book searching method which provide a user with an explanation on an object of which an image is captured, and a machine readable medium storing thereon a pictorial book searching program which makes the digital pictorial book system function.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, it is highly demanded to find out species of animals and plants discovered during mountain climbing, diving, and the like, then and there. In response to this demand, a digital pictorial book system is known which extracts a feature of an object from an image of the object captured by using a digital camera, searches for information on the object in an image database on the basis of the extracted feature, and provides a user with the information (for example, see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 1998-254901).
The conventional digital pictorial book system has made an improvement in information search by extracting a plurality of features from the captured image and searching for information on the basis of the plurality of features.
Further, recently, many image database searching systems have been available through the Internet.
If the feature data stored in the image databases on the Internet are overlapped with each other, it is very wasteful to search each of the databases sequentially by using the features extracted from the image of the object and the search efficiency is poor.
However, a method for performing the search efficiently in this case was not known with regard to the conventional digital pictorial book system.